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Just Released: Visual Studio Community 2013: The Visual Studio everybody loves now for free

Today at the Connect(); Event, Scott Guthrie and Soma Somasegar made a number of important announcements for the cloud-first, mobile-first developer. The first, Visual Studio Community 2013, is a free, full-featured development environment designed for students, open source contributors, small companies, startups and individual developers. The community edition includes all the capabilities needed to create compelling non-enterprise applications across desktop, devices, cloud, web and services including coding productivity features, cross-platform mobile development tools for Windows, iOS and Android, and full extensibility with access to thousands of extensions. Download Visual Studio Community 2013 for free and start creating apps today. In addition, Scott announced the release of Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 Preview and the .NET 2015 Preview. These previews provide enterprise application developers a first glimpse of Microsoft’s investment in an innovative set of tools and technologies to help developers efficiently build powerful, versatile, applications across the spectrum of user platforms – from Windows to web to iOS and Android. Highlights of Visual Studio 2015 Preview include the ability to create ASP.NET 5 websites that can run on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux and MacOS, integrated support for building cross platform apps that run across multiple devices, multiple IDE features to be more productive in everyday tasks, connected services experience enabling easier integration of services into apps including Office 365, Salesforce & Azure Platform Services, and many more. You can download and try out the next versions of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015 today. Finally, two other announcements are of particular interest to cloud developers. First, a preview of ASP.NET 2015 was unveiled, a streamlined framework and runtime optimized for cloud and server workloads, with side by side execution, open source and cross-platform. Additonally, Connected Services in Visual Studio 2015 makes it easier to connect applications to line-of-business (LOB) API services such as the Office 365 API, SalesForce API, among others. You can hear Scott and Soma’s keynote, along with the rest of the Connect(); on-demand content here. You can find more details on the day’s announcements on Soma’s weblog.